Is entrepreneurship the right path?
Maggie Guan asked 4 years ago
Dear Mr. Aulet,
My name is Maggie Guan, and I just attended your “Disciplined Entrepreneurship” presentation at LaunchX. It was a great and concise lecture, and there were many striking points.
I had a question about if passion could sustain your business if your passion wasn’t fully about the practice of business itself. I wanted to clarify that, as I don’t think I communicated the inquiry properly. I meant to ask that if you’re very passionate about impacting the world and making a change, but you’re not really sure if you’re truly interested in the various aspects of business (marketing, finance, etc.), would you still be likely to prosper going down that route?
My main conflict currently is that I want my career to be about bettering the lives of others, and I believe that starting an impactful company is a top choice if that were my only priority.
At the same time, I’m decently interested in coding/computer science, but I feel that taking on such a job wouldn’t give me fulfillment; it even seems selfish, in a sense, as I would be the only person benefiting from that job. I don’t think I would be able to truly live if I had to sit at a desk for 8 hours a day, writing code that serves as a tiny piece of a major corporation. The reach and impact of a path like entrepreneurship is much greater.
Is it more important to chase down fulfillment or a stable career?
Thank you so much,
Maggie
Bill Aulet answered 4 years ago
Dear Maggie,
The simple answer is simple – pursue fulfillment over a stable career.
First of all, there are no “stable careers” in the long run. Things are changing so rapidly and so fundamentally.
Secondly, I am now in my 60’s and I can tell you that money and stability does not equal happiness. In fact, they are more likely inversely related. I know lots of people who pursued money on Wall Street and got it and they are far less happy than the entrepreneurs I know. Life is too precious to waste doing something you are not excited to get up in the morning and work on (at least 3 days a week!).
I can safely assume that you will do well enough on either path to sustain yourself and your loved ones. Extra money beyond this where you had to give up part of your soul? NOT WORTH IT!
If you are proud and excited about what you do (i.e., you have a strong “raison d’etre” as I talk about in the DE Workbook), you will also be much more productive at work and happier at home.
At your age, you should focus on building skills and your personal network as much as possible. Deemphasize stability and short term earnings. When I was your age, I was similar in that I really liked most math and science where there was a right answer and you knew when you got it. As such, I was drawn to computer programming like you. But at IBM, where I spent the first 11 years of my career, they rotated me into other jobs after I did a good job on the technical side into areas like marketing, sales, finance, human resources and leadership. I found in each of the new areas there where things I liked and disliked. What I also found is that I liked learning new things and that meant I had to take on new challenges.
The more I learned, the more I found that I understood what was going on around me and I could have more impact — and control my own destiny. It really changed me in a positive way.
After working at IBM for 11 years, I then had the biggest challenge of my life in starting a new company and realized as hard as I thought I was working before, I had to take things to a new level. This also meant that I was learning at a much higher rate and increasing my impact and ability to control my destiny further. It was very uncomfortable but as I look back now, it was incredibly important to push myself. If you are comfortable, you are almost surely not learning. The day you stop learning is the day that your career and you start to die.
At your age, focus on building transferable skills and your network and not on short term earnings and stability. Those are not correlated.The investment you make now in these will pay dividends the rest of your life.
So in summary, focus on impact and build a broad base of skills as well as excellence in at least one area. Go out do something great and put a dent in the universe.